Synology NAS

While most people are perfectly happy letting their smartphone photos get backed up to Google Photos or iCloud, more serious photographers typically want to have more control than the free, automated, syncing, provides. This is especially true for those of us with large libraries of images and videos captured using standalone cameras that don’t automatically sync to the cloud. There is no shortage of public cloud services you can purchase, typically for about $100 per Terabyte per year. These include Adobe’s and Google’s Clouds, and Amazon Drive. Personally I like the deal I get with Amazon, as I can purchase 1TB of space, but my 10TB of photos don’t count towards that. However, it doesn’t have the photo-friendly editing and display tools of Google Photos or the Adobe Cloud. But what if you don’t want to trust your image library to someone else? You can set up your own, private, photo-sharing cloud fairly easily, especially if you have or are willing to purchase a Network Server (NAS). We’ve outlined some of the options in a DIY article on Extremetech.com.

The Achilles heel of network server storage for home and small business use has always been performance. Network drives are just not as fast as local drives, dollar for dollar. Even over Gigabit networks, you’re limited to just over 100MB/second maximum throughput. 10 Gigabit has been around for awhile, but has been out of the price range for most of us. Now, for less than $1,000, you can get a Synology DS-1517+ ($700) high-performance 5-bay NAS and an optional 10-Gigabit adapter (for $270). You’ll still need to add drives, and you need to spend another couple hundred bucks for a 10-Gigabit adapter for your computer, if you don’t already have one. I’ll be doing a field-test of one of these units for ExtremeTech soon, and will keep you posted here when that’s out, but wanted to give you a heads up.

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